Molecular Genetics and the Human Personality

Molecular Genetics and the Human Personality
In the 1960's and 1970's, personality and mental illness were conceptualized in an intertwined psychodynamic model. Biological psychiatry for many un-weaved that model and took mental illness for psychiatry and left personality to psychology. This book brings personality back into biological psychiatry, not merely in the form of personality disorder but as part of a new intertwined molecular genetic model of personality and mental disorder. This is the beginning of a new conceptual paradigm!!

This breakthrough volume marks the beginning of a new era, an era made possible by the electrifying pace of discovery and innovation in the field of molecular genetics. In fact, several types of genome maps have already been completed, and today’s experts confidently predict that we will have a smooth version of the sequencing of the human genome—which contains some 3 billion base pairs

Such astounding progress helped fuel the development of this remarkable volume, the first ever to discuss the brand-new—and often controversial—field of molecular genetics and the human personality. Questioning, critical, and strong on methodological principles, this volume reflects the point of view of its 35 distinguished contributors—all pioneers in this burgeoning field and themselves world-class theoreticians, empiricists, clinicians, developmentalists, and statisticians.

For students of psychopathology and others bold enough to hold in abeyance their understandable misgivings about the conjunction of “molecular genetics” and “human personality,” this work offers an authoritative and up-to-date introduction to the molecular genetics of human personality. The book, with its wealth of facts, conjectures, hopes, and misgivings, begins with a preface by world-renowned researcher and author Irving Gottesman.